The capital-P Problem is that the economics of authors, publishers, booksellers and libraries is something that authors, publishers, booksellers and libraries have hashed out since before Gutenberg while the lower-case-P problem is that shouty people on the Internet think things they like must always be good.

This war has been fought before. Back when people thought that Google wouldn't 'be evil' they scanned everything they could find under the aegis of expanding and preserving knowledge. Back then, everyone was mad at the Author's Guild because Google couldn't 'be evil' they said as much. The authors lost, after ten years and lots of money, and then tried again with HathiTrust, which they lost again. And here we are again, arguing about what fair use is and how to compensate artists and really, what it comes down to is the publishing industry has kind-of sort-of figured out how to make things work when the Internet swoops in and says "yeah we're not doing that anymore" without any real consideration for the impact on the people whose lives they're changing.

Creative destruction and all that. Rah rah Shumpeter. But music became a thing you couldn't make a living at because of that creative destruction. Writing has, too - remember, this battle was first fought in 2005. And yeah - it's super dumb that you have to jump through someone else's shitty DRM in order to enjoy your content and there bloody well should be a better way but when there are stakeholders attempting to protect their own interests the results will be awkward, slow and unwieldy.

Let's circle back:

I think libraries are good, but they're definitely bad for long-term profits of the publishing industry.

Penguin Random House makes $3.3b a year. Everything they published when they started in 1927 is four years from public domain, yet "libraries" were 2600 years old when they were founded. There's an either/or assumption in the argument for digital books that's based on... nothing. There's no basis for it. There's the inherent idea that you either have libraries or you have hard core capitalism and there's no middle ground and the thing that bugs me is whenever an author or a musician says "they're stealing my work" the Keyboard Kommandoes rise up to argue the impossibility of physical media in the Age of Spiritual Machines or some shit and it's not the subject at hand.

My beef? Is the knee-jerk need to say "fuck this guy" about someone who is thoughtfully attempting to defend his livelihood in the face of an Internet temper tantrum. Because we should be better than this. It's deeply disheartening to me that a guy who writes shit-tons of semi-okay sci fi is the Worst Person on the Internet but the guy who sold Alexa to Amazon so he could buy a bookselling conglomerate so he could offer to post used books online for a bounty is Dudley Goddamn Do-Right.

And all of it - all of it - is intellectually justifying our base instincts.